Stockton Mayor Barbara Fass was driving north on El Dorado Street with her daughter late in the morning on Jan. 17, 1989, when she started seeing ambulances racing and helicopters hovering.

Mary Gonzales Mend was working in the Stockton Unified district office on Madison Street near downtown when she learned of the tragedy. She was the district's superintendent at the time.

Patrick Johnston, a state senator from Stockton at the time, was in Sacramento.

When the shootings occurred at Cleveland Elementary, official Stockton quickly became involved. Here are some of their thoughts:

Now 68 and retired in Tucson, Ariz., Fass was Stockton's mayor from 1985-90.

Fass was deeply involved in arranging a memorial service at the Stockton Civic Auditorium attended by 3,800 people six days after the shootings.

"The city really pulled together," Fass said. "It's an old, trivial thing that when there's a crisis, people pull together. But it's really true.

"Money started coming in to bring family members in from other parts of the country. Psychologists came from other parts of the country to be of help."

The memorial service honored the five children who had been killed -- four of them Cambodian immigrants, the fifth from Vietnam.

"It was very emotional," Fass said. "It was very multicultural. It's just hard to fathom what it would be like to be in a place where you've finally escaped a country where warfare is all around you and come to this country and then this happens.

"It makes it so much more awful. Ö The whole thing was just a very emotional thing. Some turned it into incentive for them to go on with their educations and do good things for the world. And isnít that wonderful?"

Fass said she recalls that Stockton was not a welcoming place for Southeast Asian immigrants when they began moving here in the early 1980s.

"There was a lot of racism," Fass said. "There's no question about it. I remember the city and council not being supportive. One thing people in Park Village (the Cambodian housing development) wanted was a volleyball court at Oak Park. That was their game. But we couldnít get that through: 'Why do we need this, we've got tennis or football or swimming?' It seems like a trite thing, but it was a big thing."

She wonders whether increased cultural sensitivity in Stockton following the shootings was lasting.

How did the tragedy affect her? Said Fass, "I think it just reinforced what I always felt and thought. I donít think anything vastly new came out of it -- just a concern about what negativism and racism in communities can do to a community and my absolute vehemence against guns. And an appreciation of the Vietnamese and Cambodian cultures (and) empathy for what it's like to go through all of this. It just kind of reinforced that."

Mend, 69, is retired and living in Fullerton. She was Stockton Unified's superintendent from 1987-94. Afterward, she took similar positions in Mexico City, Panama and Puerto Rico.

Along with then-Principal Pat Busher, Mend was involved in the decision to reopen Cleveland the day after the shootings. Only 227 of 975 students attended on Jan. 18, 1989.

"I think we thought it was so traumatic we were going on automatic," Mend said. "I can't say there was a huge meeting and discussion to reopen. It was a decision on the part of a few of us to clean up the school, repair the damage and get back to as close to normal as quickly as possible. We wanted to restore the physical condition so we could bring in counseling for students and families without the wretched look of damage and blood and all that sort of thing."

Mend remembers a chaotic scene in the aftermath.

"Many of the parents were not English speakers," she said. "It was very difficult to reassure them about what was going on. We didnít always know which hospitals children were taken to."

Mend said she is proudest of the sensitivity the community showed to the Southeast Asian immigrants, embodied in one sense by allowing a Buddhist exorcism of the school ground to take place following the shootings.

"I think if there is anything that I am especially proud of, it was our attention to the sensitivities of the ethnic communities," Mend said. "There was some minor argument about separation of church and state. There was some discomfort about having Cambodian monks come in. But I think it was very necessary. I'm proud we didnít shy away from those realities."

Now 62, Johnston's first concern after learning of the shootings was that all he knew was that it had occurred at a Stockton Unified school and his son was a fifth-grader at Hazelton Elementary.

Johnston quickly found out the shooting had taken place at Cleveland, and he visited the school when he returned home from Sacramento that day. Over the long haul, Johnston became active in efforts to ban the sale of assault weapons, which reached fruition with a statewide ban by the end of 1989.

"My perspective in the aftermath of the shooting was that the Cleveland School killings triggered a change in attitude in the state capitol about control of assault weapons," Johnston said. "The Cleveland tragedy was the turning point for a long and up-to-then unsuccessful effort to pass legislation restricting the availability and ownership of assault weapons in California."

Johnston said he thinks the aftermath of the shootings and the memorial service showed Stockton's better side.

"For those who were looking, it revealed Stockton's sense of compassion for its fellow citizens, even if they were new, even if they didnít speak English, even if they were on the margins of society," Johnston said. "It was a quiet but powerful demonstration of the best of Stockton when one recalls the Civic Auditorium and the mix of Stocktonians who were there."

As for how it affected the community's relationship with its Southeast Asian immigrants, he said, "I think the people of Stockton are tolerant and they stay here Ö People flee to other communities where virtually everybody looks like them. People who stay in Stockton are used to the mix and find it good."